A Baptist Stuck in a Presbyterian “Body”?

(post-post note: This is long and rambly and vainly autobiographical. Just the way blogs should be.)

I’m a baptist stuck in a presbyterian (church) body, and that’s okay. God put me here.

I’ve been doing some thinking about the fact that my family and I will soon be joining a Presbyterian church, and how that fits in with my self-identification as a “reformed baptist” (and if it even matters). Through high school and especially in college, I was one of those adamant “just a Christian”-type Christians, valiantly refusing to be shackled to a denominational label. Why, then, did being a “baptist” suddenly matter so much to me? Do I really care that much about congregational governance? How much study have I really put into baptism?

I grew up going to Christian & Missionary Alliance churches. The Alliance is a very missions-oriented denomination that leans slightly toward an Arminian and dispensationalist mindset (though they’re officially neither), has a credobaptistic understanding of baptism, and a Zwinglian view of the Lord’s Supper. (Ironically enough, it was founded by a renowned Presbyterian minister named A. B. Simpson.) Despite my non-denominational lip service, I internally thought that I was going to be a lifetime C&MA guy. I loved (and still love) their committment to the Great Commission.

After I moved to Jackson, TN in 2002, Amy and I (before we were married) decided to look for a church after months and months of utter heathenry. Since she grew up in the C&MA as well, we naturally looked for an Alliance church first. The closest one was over an hour away in Memphis, though, so that idea quickly went by the wayside. We searched for a few weeks and settled on a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention . . . not a difficult thing to find, since the city was home to Union, one of the nation’s fastest growing Baptist universities (where Amy was a student). The church we started attending, and eventually joined after we married, had some of the SBC’s most prominent scholars as pastors. We were growing in our faith, experiencing better “community” than we ever had, and being taught truth by some of the best around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had a growing affinity for Baptist identity and history. At the same time, I was being introduced to reformed theology; its fidelity to Scripture opened my eyes to truths I’d never even considered. I was reading the Bible in a new way, hearing sermons with new ears, and praying with renewed fervor, and communing with Jesus in a way I hadn’t in years.

Fast-forward to 2005: our world had been turned upside-down by unemployment, forcing a move to Columbus, Ohio. As a couple, the first thing on our agenda toward again finding stability was to quickly find a good church to commit to. Along with the base requirements of believing and teaching the Bible, I wanted to find a church that believed and taught the reformed doctrines of grace (or that was at least reformed-friendly). After months of conversation, prayer, and visits here and there — some good, some bad — we settled on an urban church plant of the Presbyterian Church in America. We quickly fell in love with the liturgy, the people, and the vision of this church. I knew the entire time that our joining a presbyterian church was a possibility, as presbyterianism is largely an across-the-board reformed movement. I also knew that if such a thing happened, I’d end up having issues with the big pillar of reformed theology that I hadn’t yet come to agree with: infant baptism. As time went on, the long-dormant call to ministry that I first sensed in high school crept back, and the opportunity to do seminary-level education through the PCA arose . . . but I felt a tinge of betrayal toward the baptist heritage that I’d assumed during the last few years.

After letting that guilt eat at me for a while, I just last week realized something that I’d known all along . . . my committment is to Christ, not to the Southern Baptist Convention, not to congregational government, not to credobaptism. The main reason I’d become so committed to those things was convenience and proximity to all things SBC; not earnest study of scripture, prayer, and reasoning. Realizing this was like the clichéd “weight lifting from my shoulders”. Serving and learning and possibly pursuing ministry in the PCA was something I could freely do now without hiding from all of my baptist friends or qualifying everything with “but I dunno about the whole baby-sprinkling thing”. I mean, I still don’t know about it, but I can also honestly say that I equally don’t know if it should be withheld from the children of believers either. What had been almost a shameful thing has become a freedom to learn and explore.

So, I remain teachable. For now, I’ll call myself a “credobaptistic Presbyterian” and struggle with the issue in due time. Maybe I’ll continue to insist on believers-only immersion; maybe I’ll become a covenantal paedobaptist. I don’t know, and right now, it’s not a concern. I just want to serve Christ and his church, and now without the **BAPTISM** weight on my brain, I can more readily do so.

If you made it all the way through that, congrats. Worst. writing. evar.